 So I'm sort of clean business today. I'm with my partner, Liv Trotto. Hello, Liz. And we've got Joe Allsback with us today who spearheading a ground roots campaign to bring to light the economic incongruencies and some of the legislation that's passed in the last couple of days and is really bringing it to light, getting it in front of media, getting it in front of our lawmakers who really are in positions of authority to make some changes to get better outcomes for all of our benefits. So no further ado. Hey, Joe, could you bring us up to speed on what's happening? Yeah, so I've been working on getting the story out about the Paycheck Protection Program and the limitations that it has for small service businesses and hospitality businesses. It's particularly problematic for those of us whose businesses have closed. And the short story is Tom put it so well when he said that the Paycheck Protection Program combined with the new unemployment benefit of $600 a week, it creates an irrational economic environment for both the small business and the employees. So the math just doesn't work. And it makes it very challenging. I want to just preface all of this by saying, I'm not telling you to not apply for it. What I'm doing is I have actually applied for the PPP and it's in process at my bank. I'm communicating closely with my banker because even though it's got severe limitations, it is money that's available right now. So I'm still going forward with it. But I'm in close communication with my banker. So I just want to say that upfront because some people have thought that I'm advocating to not apply for it, which isn't what I'm saying at all. We were laughing about this yesterday. Roll the clock back. Six months ago, somebody would tell you that they would loan you two and a half months payroll on a two-year AM at 1% interest. I mean, you'd jump at that, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, by the way, there's a chance that some of that will turn into a gift and grant that you won't have to pay back. Right. It's a no-brainer. It's a no-brainer from that perspective. But what I'm talking about is the forgiveness provisions of it. So the math just doesn't work. And here's why. If you have closed and you've furloughed all of your employees, or let's say the majority of your employees, maybe you've kept on a couple. Like I've kept on one employee full-time who does my administrative and HR work and kind of acts as my business manager, you could say. And that person is still employed and everybody else is laid off. So what's gonna happen now is they will soon start getting on top of their regular state unemployment, a $600 federal supplement. And in Maine, what that's gonna add up to is somewhere in the region of 21 to $26 an hour equivalent for my employees that are staying at home. So some people have said, well, why don't you take the money from the Paycheck Protection Program and just put your people back on payroll even if they're sitting at home. So that is all well and good in theory, but I'd be asking my employees to take a pay cut to get back on my payroll compared to what they're getting on unemployment. And so that puts me in a really awkward position in visa V my employees. And also if the intent of the legislation is so that we can all retain our staff and be ready to ramp back up when we get back to some sense of normalcy, then it's running counter to that because you're asking me to give my staff a pay cut to stay with me. So that's not helping me retain my staff at all. So, there's that piece and then there's the eight week period which the way that the rules are written now, you have eight weeks from the time that you take disbursement of the loan to get to 100% staffing levels in order to take advantage of the full, of the full forgiveness provisions of the loan. And so that works great if your business is already open or you haven't had to cut back staff too much yet because you can just keep all those staff going or if you have higher paid staff and you can just put them back on payroll and it's still better than them being on unemployment. That works great, but in our case with them taking a pay cut to be on unemployment and our business is already being closed, it's problematic because in eight weeks, I really don't think it's realistic that we're gonna be back to 100% employment. There's just no way to know the effect that all of this is gonna have on customer demand. Are you gonna be able to get employees or are they gonna be homeschooling their kids? How are your customers gonna be feeling about having to come into the home? What are your customers pocketbooks gonna look like and their wallets? Are they gonna have the money to hire you back? So I do know that some of my customers will have us back but I don't see us being at 100%. So for those reasons, that's kind of the story that I'm been telling out there. Yeah, I think the economic part of this is probably the most underappreciated at the moment that it's all about health and the virus itself and as it should be, but in a month or two from now, I think that all the jobs have been lost just right now, just recently, it was the last few weeks, there's gonna be a cascading effect and there's gonna be people that are gonna be economically affected by this that don't work in hospitality, don't work in the restaurant industry, but their vendors, suppliers, their jobs are somehow tied into that, that I don't think there's gonna be many jobs out there that are gonna be impacted by all of this economic destruction that's taken place over the last few weeks. Yep, yep, I agree. Well, it's gonna last a lot longer than the virus, I'm afraid. Yeah, so, but I will say that there is some promising signs. So first of all, I just started talking about this publicly on Monday and it's Wednesday afternoon at five and we had a front page story today in one of our statewide newspapers and we have the interest from the major newspaper in our state, which is the Portland Press Herald. I just had an interview with them today. They wanna cover the story and also in Maine, we have a huge hospitality industry. Hospitality is our, I believe our number one industry or it's either one or two, but it's a very powerful industry trade group in the state and they have copped onto this and figured out how problematic it is for their membership and they have the ear of our US senators and representatives. Now, Susan Collins of Maine was one of the four US senators that authored the original bill. So she's a really important person to have the ear of and it seems that she's hearing this and is receptive to it. So, I've been working on getting press coverage. The Wall Street Journal reached out to me today and if by the way, they call while we're on this call, I am going to have to hop off because if the Wall Street Journal wants to interview you, you pick up the phone. Okay, you can just answer and ask them to haul, tell them you're already doing a very important interview. I'll do that. I'm in the middle of an interview with cleaning business today. You're gonna have to haul. But no, there's interest out there in hearing this story and really what it's all about guys is we all just want to be able to do our part to make this economic damage as controlled as possible and to make the recovery as quick as possible. And so all we're asking is for some simple rules changes so that we can contribute in a way that's economically viable and economically reasonable. So that's really what I think down to. Have you talked about those rule changes that you're requesting today? Joe, I know you did the day before yesterday but I don't think you illustrated those today, the four months or what was it exactly? Yeah, so what I've been focusing on for the past 48 hours is just taking that eight week time period and giving us a longer period of time to choose when the eight weeks is or when we take disbursements alone. So there's a couple of variations on that theme but basically saying rather than make the timeframe before June 30th, this really has to be stretched out until September or maybe the end of the year. But I've been saying six months, like we need at least six months in order to have time to get ramped back up. And an alternate change would be to just give some assurance that the money will be there so that we don't have to apply now. And the reason everybody's rushing to apply is because we're told the money is gonna run out. So it's like this mad rush because there's finite funds. And so that would be alternate but I think it really needs to be a longer timeframe. So that's the big thing we're pushing for. The secondary thing that people are talking about is we've gotta have a way to pay a differential so that our employees that are being asked to come back can make more than they would sitting at home. Otherwise it's just not, that's where Tom's point about the rationality of the economic environment. It's gotta be rational. So it's a rational to expect our employees to come back to work for a pay cut. So that has to be addressed too with some kind of rule changes. And that I know is being talked about at the national level. Would the idea be that they would reduce that $600 to where it would be up to rather than on top of the state benefit or would it be giving employers additional funds to pay a comparable premium for that period of time? I'm pushing for a comparable premium but I don't, if you made the 600 up to 600 instead of 600 that would could potentially have the same effect. But again, or you could say their pay was up to their full pay instead of paying them more than what their pay would have been. That would also do the same thing. We could talk about a whole host of other economic problems it could create if all of a sudden like 25% of the country is making 50 grand a year. I mean, I'd have big concerns about inflation and I mean, but that's, I'm not even getting into that when I'm talking to the press and talking to, because I'm not an economist and that's not really my wheelhouse, I'd leave that to somebody else. It does have some interesting implications, but hopefully the people that are making these decisions are smarter than to figure all that out. As far as the money is concerned, the $349 billion last night, the Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin made a statement that it looked likely that that money would be gone. And I haven't seen the news today, but supposedly he was going back for another $250 billion to subsidize and said if the house would approve it that they could have those monies in the pipeline by the end of day Friday. That's good. There's a couple of ifs in there, but it sounds like it would be moving fast on that. Yeah, well, yeah, no, that's really good to hear. And so I think I had mentioned the hospitality lobby in my state is onto this and has the ear. And then I have spoken with, I just got off the phone with someone from the SBA in Maine. And she wanted me to know that the SBA is aware, the SBA themselves are aware that the timing is bad, like the timing provisions are not going to work. And it sounds like there's some scrambling happening. Again, nothing has come out publicly. So, you know, as far as I'm concerned myself and the other small business owners I've been working with to kind of push this story, you know, we're going to keep advocating and pushing until we see some kind of public, you know, statement that says that they've had some rule changes, but there's reason to be hopeful and to think that things are going to change because we got to remember here, the woman I talked with from the SBA was saying like, look, nobody made these rules to try and like, you know, pull the wool over anyone's eyes or leave anyone out. It was just hastily drafted. And, you know, obviously wasn't really gamed out completely in terms of how this was all going to work out. And when they drafted it was two weeks ago or a little over two weeks ago, when we thought maybe we would be out of the woods by June 30th. And now that's just looking way, way less likely. So. You know, I saw, you know, it's interesting you mentioned, you know, like it's an election year and there's a lot of people in Congress that are going to be running. And I saw a poll yesterday and there was a lot of divisiveness back in 08 when TARP came out and all the, you know, financial, you know, stimulus came out that it was heavily weighted towards the banks and Wall Street and Main Street was kind of left out that this time around it's like over 90% the poll was, you know, who should be getting economic help this time? And just normal households was the highest, no surprise. It was like in the 90s. Right below that though was small business. It was like pushing like 80%. And down down on the end for whatever reason landlords was kind of a low number and banks was the lowest. So, you know, the people that are trying to be elected this fall are looking at those polls and going to be making decisions on, you know, where did the voters want to see this help now? I'd love to see that poll, Tom, if you could share it. Yeah, it was a CNBC poll. It's probably on the website. I'll square down and see if I can find it. Okay. Yeah, that would be, that would be great. So I do have a draft letter that I need to figure out actually how to get to our membership. I know that, and by our membership, I mean like ARCSI, I know that, you know, some people are still open and everyone's affected to varying degrees by this. And so, you know, it won't necessarily apply to everyone but to anyone who'd be interested in sending a letter to their senator or representative to raise the issue with them and point out the limitations here. Again, I'm not advocating you don't apply for it but you can apply for it and simultaneously advocate for changes to the rules and how it's being distributed. You know, Joe, our distribution list and reach through cleaning business today is really broad within the industry. I mean, we're gonna be putting that in the newsletter. We're gonna be gonna making an article and putting it, you know, on the magazine itself. We'll get it out. But, you know, we can help you get it with some other associations too. That'll be easy. Okay. All right. Good. So I've got a, the letter I have, I've had four lawyers look at it. And not all, that wasn't, it didn't set out to have a lawyer's look at it but I just found I knew a lot of lawyers. So I've had a few lawyers look at it. I've had a couple of accountants look at it and other just general business owners who are familiar with the rules and the legislation. A couple of bankers have looked at it and then also the local SBA person looked at it. I'd say it's been pretty well vetted in terms of it's clear and it's accurate. But also John, oh God, why am I forgetting his last name, John North. He's the government affairs officer for ISSA and now his name is escaping me. Does anybody know what's saying? Okay. North, North Roster, North Dr. Yeah. North there, John North there. There you go. There you go. Sorry about that. John, there you go. So, John N. So anyway, John took a look at it. ISSA is not taking this track. So, you know, to be clear, this isn't an ISSA thing. This is a, you know, small business owner. This is a Joe Walsh thing. And I'm working with a bunch of other small business owners and my- You're spearheading a grassroots movement to move, you know, move the law in the right direction. Yep. Just trying to get- This is what it calls out. Pay attention to us small service companies. But in any event, John looked it over and, you know, said, you know, language looks good and he understands what's going on. ISSA is separately, this is worth mentioning, they are pushing for provisions to get supplemental worker pay funding passed. So they're working through their government affairs people to get, you know, I don't know how it will come, whether it's reimbursable loans or whatever, but funding passed so that we can pay the staff that are working differentials. And they're focusing on hazard pay. So I just suggested to John, hazard pay is great. We also need to make sure they're making more than people that are on unemployment. Like they're, they're both, they both have to happen. So ISSA is working on it just slightly different. They have a slightly different take on the whole thing. So yeah. I know there was a lot of frustration and been on a couple of, been in a couple of groups and people are really frustrated and irritated and trying to figure out what to do. And I guess for me it's less frustrating because I have had to make some fast decisions many, many times. And I would say about 90% of the time they were not perfect. So it's rare that when I have to make a really fast decision and just do it right now that it comes out exactly perfect. So I feel confident that they're, like you said earlier, the intention is to help us and to do what they can to make sure that we all survive this. So I feel confident that something's gonna happen. In our favor. Yeah, and you know, I do too. And some people that I've seen since I've started doing this in the past two days some people have, some people are taking the tack of getting very angry about it or just getting very confrontational about it. And I haven't gotten that way and that's not my intent here. My intent is just to illustrate the issue. And the issue is one that is kind of hard to understand unless you are a small business owner actually looking and gaming out the scenarios and running the models. So it's a matter of just figuring out how to tell the story in a way that the policymakers can understand. And I believe in a way that the public can understand because that's how we get public support for our own small businesses and our own industry. So I'm not pointing fingers and I'm not trying to place blame. It's just this is clearly an oversight. We wanna do our part, help us do that. It's really the tone I'm making. What the government is doing here is just so very ambitious, the magnitude of this. The amount of SBA lending that is taking place like within this one week period is comparable to three years worth of SBA lending. If you just look at historical volume. So, and we've talked about the unemployment claims in like 10 million unemployment claims over the last two weeks. And if you think about that, the highest number ever on a weekly basis prior to that was 695,000, we've done 10 million. Just being able to get 10 million claims on a computer over a two-week period. So there's some really heroic things that are happening here, you know. So the oversights and the gaps in logic and the deadlines and the target dates that are being missed. I mean, it's hard to get mad about that. I mean, you look at it all in context, it's understandable. Yeah, I completely agree. And that's why I've been, the people that I talk to that are getting impatient or getting angry about it, I just try to counsel patients. I know it's easy to say, but it's like, you know, there are really, I like what you said, Tom, there are some heroic things happening. Like there really are. So we just need to put it in perspective. And, you know, I've got a friend who's in a pretty important role in a relatively small community bank. And they've never been an SBA lender, but they thought that this was, you know, from a community standpoint, this was the right thing to do. So they took this on. And those guys are like working night and day and the part of the story that's going untold is their regular business, the stuff that they do to really pay the bills is just kind of setting their languishing. So it's really creating a lot of, a lot of agency costs, a lot of dilemmas for, you know, a lot of the banks. But I don't know about, you know, the large institutional banks, but there's a ton of, you know, regional and smaller banks that have jumped into this just to help. And, you know, they're doing it at a real economic cost because they're not in a position to take care of just the normal routine business that really pays their bills. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I could see that. We have a couple of questions over here, comments to, Robin says, has the SBA stipulated how much can be paid above what would normally be paid to the employees? And can we pay bonuses to level set the unemployment benefits paid? I haven't read anything about that. Have you guys? I can take that there. Okay, great. So Robin, you can pay your staff whatever you want, but the way that the math works for the loan is you're going to get 10 weeks, roughly two and a half months, roughly 10 weeks worth of payroll in the form of the loan itself. Okay. Now you can only use 75% of that for payroll costs, which is eight weeks of payroll. And you can get that forgiven, okay? So if you pay them more, then the SBA loan that's on you, you're not going to get that forgiven. That's just extra money you'd have to pay out. So that's where it becomes, it just is not economically rational to do that. You mentioned the 75%, Joe. I guess when I was reading that, I read that as you had to spend at least 75% of that loan on payroll, but I read it as if you wanted to spend more than 75% on payroll, you could, but you couldn't, so another way, you couldn't spend any more than 25% on it, on rent and other non-payroll expenses. I might be wrong. I don't know. No, no, no, I think I've seen conflicting things on that because that also rings true to me. I know there's a 25% maximum on non-payroll expenditures. The idea is to create jobs, so they don't want you to take that and cover a lot of operating expense and not hire people. Yeah, yeah, that's a finer point. I would need to get clear on it and just verify that I understand that completely. But you know what? All this commotion you're steering up, it's gonna change all that anyway. It is, and I would also say that in most cases, you're gonna have to pay probably like a 30% premium at least to get your employees to be above what they're gonna be collecting if they're unemployed. So that extra 25%, I don't know if that would be enough anyway, so. Wouldn't be enough for me, not my area, not for what we pay. So how does this also impact, so they want you to keep the same number of employees employed. So if you're paying people more money, you'd also have to have more people. So it seems kind of like you might end up not even having any kind of a benefit there. But it might not even be your favor. Yeah, that's a one that comes back to the economic, it's like not rational. It doesn't, the math doesn't work, I think would be the shortest way. Yeah, I was Kevin say, I don't know if this is already common knowledge, though local SBDC are available to help you navigate the applications and deciding the next steps you take. So that's great. That's an awesome. Yeah, that is great. And Greg says Ohio Governor Mike DeWine in Ohio Bureau of Workers Comp Administrator, today proposed giving up to 1.6 billion to Ohio employers this spring to ease the economic impact. Wow, that's a state level, that's impressive, that's awesome. Wow, I wonder how that's gonna, well, you know, Derek is always saying that Ohio was a front runner, so. That's awesome. Those states are a lot more fiscally constrained than the government. States aren't really allowed to borrow the way the federal government can. So that's really cool to hear that Ohio's doing that. States don't print their own money. No, that's, yeah. That's it. And I like to. One of the Fed Governors made a statement a few weeks ago that we've got an infinite amount of money. If we need more, we just print it. Makes me nervous, I know. Yeah, you don't have to think about that for a minute, but he said that in an interview. Yeah. So Gina is saying Ohio from last year's dividends. Probably at a surplus, something, yep. Wow, nice. I was going to mention earlier too, when we were talking about the money, the funds being exhausted, $349 billion. Is that right, Tom? $349 billion? $349 billion, yes. I had received a letter from Bank of America. All right, Gina, I didn't get it personally in my inbox, somebody else sent it to me. That they had already received applications over one, one, I can't remember the number. Okay, let me go look. I'm like, I want to get right. A big number. There's a lot of numbers in our hand. It was more than the $349, so I'm like, well, and that's only Bank of America. I'm like, one bank. Yeah. I think actually, from this anecdotal talking to people, that they got their stuff together a little bit faster than some of the other banks. They were taking applications on Friday from what I recall. They were accepting them. They just weren't able to push back yet. They had them all keyed back. Yeah, so usually I have Bank of America and usually I'm not a huge fan of Bank of America. So in this case, I've been like, all right. Yeah, I know. I'm sorry. I think you're all right. All right, I'll stop being like I am, ugh. So did you, were you showing your letter, Joe, the one that you had vetted and? I have it right here. I don't know if I, I mean, I can put it up on the screen if you want, but I mean, I can also share it. There is actually a really good article in Forbes magazine that kind of helped frame this issue really, really well. And when I saw it on, I think it was Monday morning or maybe it was Sunday, it kind of helped like coalesce the whole thing in my mind. Am I able to put that into the comments here? So everybody could. You can put the, yeah, you can put any link to a webpage in the comments and you can share your screen if you have a document you wanna share. Yeah, so, well, I mean, I can show the document. So this is, this will be what I'll be sending around. I'll just give you a second here. Just pulling it up. Okay. Oh, look at that. Getting better at this, Tom. Oh, look at you. Can you see my, my runner? We're, we're, we're adding it. Yeah, is that you, is that you John? Oh, there we go. Look at the color. I know this one's hair has been that long in a while, Tom. Yeah, it's been a while. It's a good point. Yeah. You know, I'm gonna picture somewhere with you on a paddle board out in the Atlantic Ocean. We'll give you that. You can't get that. Oh, I'd like to see that, Tom. Okay. So yeah, this is what it'll look like. You know, I'm gonna encourage everyone read through it, familiarize yourself with it, make changes. I tried to keep it as general as possible for the general public. Did you blow that up a little bit, Joe? It's really small. Tiny, tiny, tiny. Yeah. There, let me, there we go. Oh yeah, that's better. So much better. Okay, so, you know, we wanna let our senators and senators and representatives know that we are small businesses and that we've been excited about this. You know, we really wanna let everyone know that we are not, we're not just whining and complaining here. We're offering solutions. And so, you know, we've been excited, but you know, when we, now that we have a more thorough understanding of the rules, it's apparent that there's major oversights. And so, you know, the effect is that we could have to take on a bunch of unforgivable debt and we risk losing our employees for good. So we wanna sort of, this is why you need to pay attention to this. Here, there's a little story about why, you know, about closing my business. If you haven't closed, you could modify that. And then just sort of introducing the issue with the eight weeks. This paragraph here addresses the uncertainty and just that eight weeks is not enough time to get back to a hundred percent. There's a link here to the Forbes piece, which I would love to send in the chat. It's actually a very good piece. Sums everything up nicely. Hey, Angel. Yep. You have a typo in there. Did you just catch that? Oh, no, where? It says, the recent piece informs it up nicely. It says Forbes. The recent piece. Yep. You saw it. The word N should be N. N, again. Oh. Sums N. Nope. Here we go. We look at that. Listen to that. Listen to that. Listen to that. Listen to that. Listen to them call that. Listen to them call that. Yeah. I help it. Sorry. That's great. So, and then this addresses why we can't just pay them to sit at home because usually when you're talking to someone about this, it's the first thing they'll say, why don't you just pay them to sit at home? And so that's why that doesn't work. And then this is where this is the ask. So, what we're asking for. So we need at least six months from the time the government orders are lifted and to start our eight week grant period. And we're also asking for better guidance on the unemployment provisions. So basically tell us how to interpret this so that we can start making decisions. We need a more clear regulatory environment so we can make good business decisions, right? And then in short, this is where Tom's phrase gets in there, which I love. We wanna create a rational economic environment for small businesses so we can do our part. This is a really important thing here. Guys, we're standing by and we want to help. We want to make this better. We wanna bring our businesses back and that's what the government wants us to do. So this is a classic like help us help, help us help you kind of a thing and just showing that we really want, we really wanna jump in. So that's a really important piece. I added in a piece here about why this is especially important in Maine. I would delete that for the national population but in our state more than 60% of our employment comes from businesses with less than 50 employees and hospitality is one of the top two industries. So it's always good if you can throw in a fact like that to like this is why you need to care about this but you wouldn't have to do that, that's optional. And then that's it. And then I just leave with my contact information. That is really, really an excellent piece of work there, Jo. It really is, Jo. Imagine that it can't be listened to. And then here you've got the Heason Forbes. So it was actually written by this guy, Andrew Righi or Righi and I'm gonna make this bigger. So Andrew Righi is actually, he's like a lobbyist for restaurants and nightlife venues in New York City. He did a great job summarizing the issue. So I'll send this around but he did a really good job framing it and making it easy for the general public to understand. So in this case, you could take restaurant or bar and just replace it with service business or hospitality business or I'm talking with a guy who owns a couple of really big popular hair salons in the state and he's affected in the same exact way. And you know what's really interesting? Guys who own hair salons know a lot of people. So like he's really helping connect us with a lot of people. So that's really cool. But anyway, I'll send a link to this in here. Another reason I'm hopeful everyone is just because the restaurant and hospitality lobbies nationally are really powerful and people really pay attention to them. So we're in the same boat they are. So I do feel hopeful that rule changes will be made in a timely manner here. So I can stop sharing. So if you feel that that template is ready to launch I'll go ahead and load that into the resources on cleaning business today where we can go to the Corona virus dash downloads page and we can all download it and put it to work. Yeah. And so that would be to state I guess national lawmakers I guess that can be the media. We could be sending that to a lot of different directions, right? Yeah, so I actually am gonna have two documents and this one's almost done. So when I get off the call I can actually wrap it up and email it over to you Tom and then you can post it. And I have a separate but very similar one that you could use to contact press. So if any of you are comfortable talking to the press that would be it's an awesome way to get the word out. And so yeah, we can do both. I know some of you are really skilled at working with the press and getting PR. So this is a great time to shine and help advocate for your community. You probably know other small business owners in your community. It's a great opportunity to really raise the profile of the entire cleaning industry by being the leader in your community. So I think it's, there's an opportunity to lead here for sure. Yeah, I'm really excited to share it. Yeah, that's awesome. The professional companies, I mean, this is, we've been working really hard for a long, long time to be differentiated in the marketplace and the minds of the consumer, you know, anybody can clean, right? And it's like, no, it's exactly, we're professionals. And, you know, we have real companies with training and insurance and all of the, you know benefits that go along with working with it with the professional organization, professional company and, you know, the coronavirus this crisis has created an opportunity. It's almost a reset that we have an opportunity to get that message across now because we're going to be heard. You know, everybody, you know, sees cleaning in a more valuable light. You know, they understand that, you know there's a correlation between cleaning properly and reducing the chance of me getting this really bad virus that has the potential of putting me in a hospital on a respirator and killing me. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, there's the, you know so the more of us that, you know are able to get out in front of this, you know I do think it helps raise the profile of the whole industry. So, you know, we can be winning a lot of winning a lot of, winning a lot of support here and I guess solving a lot of problems at the same time. So it's good. And we have this additional opportunity for synergy with other industries that we typically don't have professional industries especially we typically are looked at as, you know, the ugly stepchild and no matter how much we scrabble we don't really get heard and in this way we actually have a chance to really make something bigger and better happen. So it's really, really exciting. Yeah, and actually to build on that point Liz it's like, you know, I have to say that working with these other small business owners over the past four to eight hours it's been really gratifying. And, you know, it really does give you an opportunity to connect with other people in your community that you wouldn't otherwise have an opportunity to connect with and you're connecting with them in a way that where you're leading and where, you know, you're coming out in front of it and you're showing that, look this isn't just about me and my business this is about, you know all of us in the service and hospitality industry and you're kind of all in the same boat. And so it's an opportunity to help recognize that. And, you know, we have to understand that there's gonna be goodwill from that that's going to continue, you know after this crisis is over and that can only help all of us. So. Absolutely. All right, so I will hop off the call and wrap this up so I can get it over to you, Tom. If you want to take that forward article the link to it, you can drop that in the comments. Oh yeah, I don't know. I feel like such a good move here, but okay, because I have a chat, right? Okay. I can. I think I have, I know that article you're talking about, I can do that. You sent it to me this weekend. Okay. When you were quote unquote offline. I know. Okay, this is funny. I talk to Tom. This is funny. I talked to Tom. When was it Friday, Tom? Or? Actually, you sent a text Saturday basically saying you were shutting it down. You're going offline for 24 hours. I was like, I've had it. My brain's fried. I'm mush. I need to take 24 hours off. I'm gonna tune out. And then on Sunday, I started posting stuff on Facebook and I got wrapped into a, anyway. I didn't unplug. Somebody's to say. He made a comment. It was very thoughtful and it really wasn't political. It was, you know, based more on a point than taking political sides, but it did happen to mention the president. So, you know, a lot of people started chiming in and it was just spun out all of them is laughing. Tom, not all foibles. You and my whole family, I mean, it was just so funny. Not all foibles. It's so funny. Everyone's laughing. You know, I do want to say too that I hope it comes across in the moment. I'm talking about this, but you know, in case there's any doubt, I have no political motivations or anything and I'm not picking sides here. I've had some people who have tried to pull me into their political battles as I've become a more vocal advocate for rules changes, but that's not what I'm about. You know, some people are trying to turn this into like some kind of campaign against a certain US Senator or against, you know, a certain policy or whatever. And that's not what I'm about. It's just, this is about helping our small businesses come out the other side of this as healthy as we can. That's really what this is about. So, you know, despite the waters I waited into, you know, Sunday was probably, well, it was fun watching. But what you're doing here in terms of pointing out PPP the way it's structured with the, you know, additional unemployment benefits is kind of like the perfect storm. And it is economically irrational. So I don't care what your political orientation is, it defies objective logic. So hopefully that point comes across regardless of everything else. And, you know, cooler heads, smarter heads will prevail. Right, right. Well, so I guess we've done enough of this. So if the Wall Street Journal, when they call, you can go ahead and take their call now, Joe. Okay. All right. Well, thank you, everybody. And thank you for having me on the call today, Tom and Liz. I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to talk today. And thanks everybody for tuning in. And yeah. Thank you to all ours, Joe. Keep on keeping on, everybody. One more thing, Joe. Oh, okay. One more thing before you leave. Yeah. Tom and I were talking yesterday. And I know that this is not a political thing for you, but in that you probably would be a really good person to be out there in the political realm because you are so balanced, easy to listen to, very inspiring. Jess, we vote for you. We both said, I vote for you. And you are jolly. Thank you. Thank you. I'm definitely not there yet. I'm having way too much fun in the business world right now, but thank you for the vote of confidence. I appreciate it. And if I do want to do something, I'll make sure you know about it. Okay. Yeah. Make that an excuse of your own opinion today. Make sure that they were the first to break that story. Oh, God. All right. Well, thank you, guys. I appreciate it. Thanks, Joe. Talk to you soon, man. All right. Thank you. Bye. Yeah, Joe for State Senate. See, we vote. We don't live there, but we would. I might even have to move to, I don't know if I'd move to Maine, but. And you could move to Maine. I don't know what would happen to you. You guys have to shut down your schools when it's below 50, right? I don't think you could live in Maine. Yeah. I mean, actually it gets down and in the low 30s they'll shut school down because kids don't typically have enough cold, whether it's cold or, you know, wait for the school or not. Yeah. I have seen your son in shorts all the way through winter. So I'm not thinking you could live in Maine. I'm not thinking so. Shorts and flip flops. Yeah, it's too cold. Flip flops. It's the same thing. Yeah. Yeah, your flip flops. Well, does anybody else have any questions, issues, anything else that they want to talk about today? Or do we have a shorter call today? Give people some time to go work on your businesses. No, Liz. I do have something before we close. Go ahead, Tom. No, I was gonna just kind of reiterate something that you shared yesterday that I thought was really, really good. We started making the point yesterday that there's a lot of financial things that we're doing. We're massaging our balance sheet a lot in terms of trying to get the government loans figured out and how all of that's gonna work and everything from car notes to leases to mortgages and all of that forbearance so we can save as much cash now as possible at the same time. We really gotta get to the point where we can start looking at what's next and what do we need to do to be planting the seeds so we can hit the ground running and it start growing when this thing starts to break. And you made a really good point, Liz, about planting the seed in the minds of our clients that these are some things that are happening in the community, things that we're starting to see about the virus in terms of infection rates and things, look for anything that you can to start help getting people oriented to things might be looking better. So when it's time to really get out there and push our service and Mrs. Jones, you're ready for us to come back and resume your regular cleaning. It'll be, well, of course I am because you've been subliminally telling me for the last two weeks that it's getting better and better, so why not? Yeah, it's time and now it's okay. Yeah, yeah, that's something that needs to happen sooner is better for that message to start going out there. Yeah, okay. I had another thought too, Tom, go ahead. What's that, Liz? No, we've got a delay. I had another thought for everybody today in our mastermind accountability groups. We did just a quick SWOT analysis, just strengths, weaknesses, active opportunities and threats and it was kind of, everybody's mind shift changed from this thing is exhausting, I'm tired, I'm like, oh, what am I gonna do to, wow, okay. Let's energizing and some ideas and some new thoughts instead of just the same, the same thoughts that keep going around and around. So just encouraging people to, maybe just a quick SWOT analysis on your business and twist your mind set around just a little bit, get you in a better place. I like that, that's all I do at this point. Maybe tomorrow, Liz, could you share with us a little bit about how that exercise works and maybe explain what SWOT, I don't know if, we might have people on our Facebook lives here that haven't ever had the pleasure of going through that exercise. Oh, sure, yeah, I'm happy to do that. And maybe we could brainstorm it a little bit and then illustrate a little bit. I think that would be useful, looking forward. Sure, that's a great idea. Yeah, and really the SWOT analysis does help you to look forward in a really good way. So yeah, what does David have to say here? Please send us your questions about ensuring clients and employees and other stakeholders like the community at large shall stay for their service, knowledge and communications. Yes, thanks, David, it's great. Greg, I see you're asking about the article that shows coronavirus risks based on types of jobs. I'll reach out to Matt. Matt Ricketts has referenced that article before and I'll ask him to see if he can get that for us because I'd like to get that too. And if he does, we'll go ahead and we'll post that on our resource page. He said it was in the New York Times. I did go and look, but I couldn't find it. I think it's because he said it was a little bit off from this, that this was part of the information in the article, but the tenor of the article was not exactly this. So I couldn't find it. I did look though, if anybody else has it to let us know. Oh, looks like Ellen's on. Hey, Ellen, I see you're saying hi to Ellen. Hey, Ellen. Haven't seen Ellen in a while, so. Yeah, so we were talking about some training. Tom's working on a little bit of a training program with some certificate of completion aspect to it and hoping to start that next week, Tom. Do you have an idea what it would be one day or? Yeah, well, I think you and I need to put our heads together and work out a couple of details. You know, do we want to do it all in one pop? I'm not even sure how long you can take. We could probably do it in as little as an hour and a half, two hours, or if we wanted to spend longer on it, it's easier to take longer than it is to do it shorter. But I'm thinking by Monday or Tuesday of next week at the latest, we'd be in a position where we could do it and we'll have a test at the end and people complete the class. We can send them a certificate of completion, something to show that they took it. Heather had specifically asked it on that certificate of completion that we have them completing it for their company, for the company that they work for, which I thought made good sense as well. We could do that. Yeah. So if you have anything that you know you'd like to see addressed in that training, remember this training is specifically for your technicians, the people who work for you that are out there doing the cleaning, anything that you want to make sure that they know, let us know about it. Send us a note, post it in here and we'll be fine on this thread. But make sure we're aware of the info. Tom, it looks like we're slower today here. Maybe, ooh, we're with you. I don't know if you're gonna come back here. I'm guessing maybe so. Yeah, can you see my screen with us? All right, well, oh, there we go, I can. So I'm thinking as these are the questions that we want to answer on our training class next week. And again, this is not the whole disaster recovery, forensic cleaning, has this material deep clean work. That's the GBAC class and we can get that through ARC. So you had a really, really great rate. I think it's like $49, which is awesome. And I think as a class, I would encourage everybody to take, at least as business owners, you need to know what that's about and how it's done and what it takes. And so when you get that phone call and somebody's asking you to go into a high work site, you know what the deal is and you can make a decision in terms of how you want to proceed from an informed perspective. This is more, what we're doing next week is going to be more for post COVID-19 world where we do, Mrs. Jones's house every other week, what are the special precautions we need to take to make sure that we're safe, she's safe and we're making her home safe. And we're doing the things that we're supposed to do from a community standpoint. So I can take this, I guess, and maybe just see how this works. This is still a little bit fluid, but hey, how about that? Lisa is also saying one is how to train new cleaners and how to do, I'm guessing, ongoing training while keeping that six foot social distancing. That is gonna be trickier. How do you train people, especially in a bathroom? Like a fairly small bathroom, you're gonna have to stand outside the door while you're talking to them outside the door and talk to them, yes, definitely a concern there. Kevin says, I'd like it possible to get in touch with someone else who is also involved in office commercial in a large metro area. We're in the New York metro area. So anybody that is in office commercial in New York anywhere, sounds like, hit them up here. And go ahead, Kevin. What I would do, Kevin, is write to the Peony Business Day Facebook page and just post that request there. I mean, there's a bunch of people there and I would like to go to some of the other pages as well. I would go to the Arcsy page and just drop it in a couple of the larger Facebook pages and I'm sure that you'd get some responses. Tom, Lisa is asking any ideas for online video training models with Q and A? Online video, are we talking about material that's already developed or? Maiden, like the core videos that Sharon Timber puts out, like that? Is that what you're trying to leave some? Or are you looking to make your own? Oh, the first, I'll respond to Kevin. Good job, Tom. Oh, Kevin, if the sound is back here, the first page he said was Cleaning Business Today and then he said also the Arcsy page. Lisa is talking about to make her own, Tom. Yeah, that's a good question. You know, we might get Matt to help us with that because he was sharing yesterday that he was making his own training videos. Maybe. And they're very nice. Do a how-to for that. Yeah, and his videos, yeah, you know he will. Matt, he's all about helping. Yeah, absolutely. And his videos are very nice. I just saw a new one that he created yesterday, so they're very good. So, Tom, it's the one, did you post your link yet, your Cleaning Business Today link? Yeah, let's go ahead and do that. It is time. Here's Cleaning BusinessToday.com. We're the writers where we subscribe and if we go to coronavirus.dash rather downloads, think I would be able to get that right by now. You know, these are like all of the resources that we've been sharing over the last few weeks. Added a couple of more here that I think will be useful to you. We were talking yesterday about being able to spread expectations with your customers. We touched on them here today as well. On this point out, we really need to start telling our clients when we think that we're gonna be opening again and we're giving them clues and signs as to when that's gonna be happening. Here's a download here. And this is by a group of really smart people. Scott Gottlieb, he's in the news a fair amount. He used to be the FDA commissioner and he and a bunch of his partners basically wrote out the steps and the things that we need to be looking for to start opening up the economy. And here's really good information here that you could use in some of your communication and one of the key things that you wanna be able to do is for your state to be able to speak to how the healthcare system is doing. So I'll just go here to Georgia for instance. We're 12 days away. Supposedly peak medical resource usage is gonna hit April 20. So that would be something that you could be sharing with your clients now that you see that as a tipping point. Doesn't necessarily mean that you're gonna be cleaning homes on the 20th but that would be one of the things that you'd wanna see because at that point hopefully all the PPE that our healthcare workers are needing at the moment would be available and the stay at home orders that are in place and a lot of states should be loosening up at that point. So that's just a resource you can use to keep up with what's going on in your state and share with your clients and your cleaning professionals as well because you certainly wanna be including your staff in all of this as well and keeping them stoked with the idea that, hey, we're gonna be going back to work here pretty soon and that's what I'll be part of that communication as well. So let me copy this. And when I get Joe's template, I'll go ahead and I'll upload that and I'll put a link here and that'll be available on this page as well which is really awesome. I'm looking forward to getting that. Yeah, I'll be right. And just to maybe close out this call today, Tom, are this Facebook live? Maybe we could just have a few minutes of silence before we actually stop the live for Julie McAdoo and her husband who I'm sure everybody has seen by now has passed away from the coronavirus. Maybe just close out that way. Thank you guys. Peace out. And rest well. See you tomorrow at five.